Special Program Root Tag

The University of California’s Haas School of Business will honor Vanguard founder John C. Bogle a week from today with the Berkeley Award for Distinguished Contributions to Financial Reporting at the school’s 17th Annual Conference on Financial Reporting.

Wachovia is seriously bidding for MFS Investment Management, a source has told the Charlotte Observer.

Nasdaq Global Funds, a subsidiary of the Nasdaq Stock Market, announced yesterday it is transferring sponsorship of its exchange-traded funds to PowerShares Capital Management.

State Street Corp. said that its third-quarter profits nearly doubled from a year earlier, to $278 million, or 83 cents a share, as servicing and management fee revenue continued to increase.

Mutual fund managers are expanding emerging markets borders—looking to invest in such exotic locales as Vietnam, Malaysia, Indonesia, Bulgaria, Peru, Panama, Bolivia and Botswana, MarketWatch reports.

General Motors is bringing back 401(k) matches of 50 cents on the dollar, up to 4% of an employee’s salary, beginning Jan. 1, the Detroit Free Press reports.

Americans who believe they can still join a company or government agency that will provide them with a generous pension plan once they retire are in for a rude awakening, said MFS Investment Management Chairman Robert C. Pozen, who is also a member of President Bush’s Commission to Strengthen Social Security.

BISYS has reached an agreement to settle class-action lawsuits filed against it in the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York.

Ford Motor sent notices to employees last month telling them it will drop Fidelity’s Magellan fund and three other funds from two other companies from its 401(k) lineup, The Wall Street Journal reports.

With Japan’s economy finally revived, the nation’s mutual fund industry is booming, Yield reports. The number of Japanese invested in mutual funds has risen from 15 million in 1990 to 40 million today. Of the total $420 billion invested in mutual funds in the nation, $169 billion is in equity mutual funds. That’s 13% lower than its peak in 1989, even though the average Japanese stock price is only 50% of what it was in 1989.

Fortune magazine has named Abigail Johnson, president of Fidelity Employer Services, No. 18 on its list of the “50 Most Powerful Women.”

Once again, the performance of the stocks of publicly traded asset management firms is besting the average equity mutual fund, Bloomberg reports.

Banc of America Securities, Bank of America’s investment arm, is spinning off its European buyout division and its North America venture capital division to reduce its direct exposure to private equity.

The Securities and Exchange Commission announced Monday it has named John T. Dugan associate district administrator for enforcement in its Boston office, responsible for overseeing enforcement throughout New England.

Morgan Stanley is considering beefing up its hedge fund business by acquiring a stake in $10.5 billion Avenue Capital Group and all of $6 billion FrontPoint Partners Dow Jones reports.

The companies that acquire MFS Investments and Putnam Investments may very well drop the names due to the fact many investors still associate them with the trading scandal, financial executives tell the Boston Herald.After all, they reason, the purchasers of Bank of Boston, Shawmut and Fleet dropped those names, too, even though they were considered to be quite venerable. Instead, the companies that acquire MFS and Putnam are likely to give the companies a complete makeover.

The NASD announced Monday it has fined Citizens Bank’s broker/dealer subsidiary, CCO Investment Services, $850,000 for not properly supervising sales of 529 college savings plans and annuities to ensure that the products were suitable for investors. The bank also didn’t adequately supervise telemarketing calls to make sure that employees didn’t call consumers who had registered their names on federal do-not-call lists, the NASD said.

Once again, Standard & Poor’s scorecard on indices versus active funds has shown that the S&P 500 outperformed 80.3% of actively managed large-cap funds during the third quarter. The S&P SmallCap 600 outperformed 50.8% of small cap funds. Actively managed mid-cap funds were the exception, with 70% of them beating the S&P MidCap 400 during the third quarter.Year-to-date through September, indices led actively managed large-cap and small-cap funds. In the first three quarters of the year, the S&P 500 has outperformed 71.5% of large-cap funds, while the SmallCap 600 has outpaced 66% of small-cap funds.

Make greater way for hedge funds. The Bank of New York and Casey, Quirk & Associates estimate that hedge funds will go from $360 billion in invested assets to over $1 trillion by 2010. The number might seem on the high side, but in 2004 BoNY estimated a five-fold increase by 2006, and the estimate for this year is now leaning towards a six-fold increase from $60 billion to $360 billion.A driving force in the forecast is pension funds in the U.S. “Broadening acceptance of alternative investments coupled with lower expected returns from traditional investments are driving demand for hedge funds among global institutional investors,” said Brian Ruane, executive vice president at the Bank of New York.

The loosely regulated hedge fund market presents a risk to the financial market and economists fear that another Amaranth Advisors situation could occur, but on a larger scale with more impact, The Wall Street Journal reports, based on its monthly survey of 50 economists.